Of all the industries that have been revolutionized by the rise of digital technology and the Internet, few have been swept so greatly as the “content” industries, such as producers and providers of music, movies, pay per view (PPV), Video on Demand (VoD), interactive media, and the like. The Internet has made widespread distribution of such content easier than ever. The content delivered over the Internet may be provided in a variety of containers. One such popular container for video and/or audio content is known as the Flash Video format container or FLV. One of the reasons for its popularity is because it is viewable on most operating systems through a readily available FLV media player. These media players may often be easily, and sometimes freely, downloaded and integrated into a web browser as a plug-in.
In a traditional configuration, a server is employed to enable a client's media player to request the FLV container to be downloaded over the Internet, to be played on the client device. Several traditional configurations currently exist to enable the FLV container to be streamed to the client device, including those that use of a proprietary communication protocol known as Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), developed by Adobe Systems (formerly developed by Macromedia). The FLV container may also be streamed using RTMP wrapped within the HTTP communications protocol. Using RTMP, the FLV container may also be streamed as an encrypted file to the client device's media player. However, use of the RTMP protocol has often resulted in an expensive server configuration, thereby limiting the use of the RTMP as a mechanism to stream FLV container in some environments.
Using HTTP to stream or progressively download FLV container to the client device's media player, while currently less expensive, sometimes results in exposing the content to a security risk. This is because in today's configuration, even though the FLV container may be transported over network from the server as an encrypted file, the decrypted FLV container may be exposed, or in the clear on the client device. Such exposure enables the FLV container to be improperly copied and/or distributed. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.